17-year-old builds neural network capable of detecting breast cancer

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Every year Google holds on online science fair competition that is open to anybody between 13 and 18 years of age. It’s in this competition we get to see the bright minds of tomorrow, people who will no doubt go on to do amazing things with their lives. Once such person is 17-year-old Brittany Wenger. Her idea was to develop a global neural network based in the cloud that can help doctors diagnose breast cancer.

Artificial neural networks (ANN’s) are a way for computer scientists to model a brain, but in some ways they are more powerful. An ANN can see patterns in data that no human can, thus they can be more accurate and the more training data a neural network is given, the more accurate they can be. Brittany’s idea came from to goal of making breast cancer biopsies to be less invasive. Fine needle aspirates are the least invasive biopsy procedure, but doctors often need to perform more invasive procedures in order to be certain.

By looking at nine different input features and comparing them to the training examples, Brittany’s cloud-based neural network can detect malignant breast tumors with an accuracy of 99.11%, which is incredible. Because her neural network is deployed in the cloud using Google’s app engine it means it can be accessed from existing medical systems as well as through a web browser or mobile apps.

Brittany took the Grand Prize at the Google Science Fair which consisted of $50,000 for a scholarship, a trip to the Galapagos islands, and an internship with one of the fair’s sponsors. She’s also hoping that her program can be put to use in actual hospitals soon and that it can be extended to other forms of cancer.

I took a look through Brittany’s presentation slides and was astonished at her level of intelligence. Having just completed a degree in software engineering I still don’t understand neural networks enough to even replicate what she’s done. I can only dream of contributing something to the world as helpful as this, but it’s definitely an inspiration to go further and try to achieve it.

Speak Your Mind

Pedro D.

Hello, I’ve seen that the winner has presented a project that is even older than me, existing tons of papers around it, for example:http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~p88012/AI-final.pdfAnd she took her dataset from here: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Breast+Cancer+Wisconsin+(Original)

There’s nothing new to this project except the attention it is getting now.

Sorry google, I was thinking on participating in this fair next year, but you lost my credibility and since i don’t care about the money at all, I will not participate never.

This year there were more creative projects than the 1st winner and they where not ripped of from other’s hard work like this one was, The only thing here worthy the prize is her interest for the subject, but still the other contestants are equally interested for science so…

Thank you google for destroying the credibility of this contest, luckily for you, half of the people don’t even know what perceptrons are, so this contest will still look amazing for their eyes.

This is very sad indeed… Promoting the attitude of stealing other’s works.